Visualising a three way interaction between two continuous variables and one categorical variable in R
Here are a couple of options for visualizing the model output in two dimensions. I'm assuming here that the goal here is to compare Treatment
to Control
library(tidyverse)
theme_set(theme_classic() +
theme(panel.background=element_rect(colour="grey40", fill=NA))
dat = read_excel("Some Data.xlsx") # I downloaded your data file
mod <- lm(DV ~ IVContinuousA * IVContinuousB * IVCategorical, data=dat)
# Function to create prediction grid data frame
make_pred_dat = function(data=dat, nA=20, nB=5) {
nCat = length(unique(data$IVCategorical))
d = with(data,
data.frame(IVContinuousA=rep(seq(min(IVContinuousA), max(IVContinuousA), length=nA), nB*2),
IVContinuousB=rep(rep(seq(min(IVContinuousB), max(IVContinuousB), length=nB), each=nA), nCat),
IVCategorical=rep(unique(IVCategorical), each=nA*nB)))
d$DV = predict(mod, newdata=d)
return(d)
}
IVContinuousA
vs. DV
by levels of IVContinuousB
The roles of IVContinuousA
and IVContinuousB
can of course be switched here.
ggplot(make_pred_dat(), aes(x=IVContinuousA, y=DV, colour=IVCategorical)) +
geom_line() +
facet_grid(. ~ round(IVContinuousB,2)) +
ggtitle("IVContinuousA vs. DV, by Level of IVContinousB") +
labs(colour="")
You can make a similar plot without faceting, but it gets difficult to interpret as the number of IVContinuousB
levels increases:
ggplot(make_pred_dat(nB=3),
aes(x=IVContinuousA, y=DV, colour=IVCategorical, linetype=factor(round(IVContinuousB,2)))) +
geom_line() +
#facet_grid(. ~ round(IVContinuousB,2)) +
ggtitle("IVContinuousA vs. DV, by Level of IVContinousB") +
labs(colour="", linetype="IVContinuousB") +
scale_linetype_manual(values=c("1434","11","62")) +
guides(linetype=guide_legend(reverse=TRUE))
Heat map of the model-predicted difference, DV treatment - DV control on a grid of IVContinuousA
and IVContinuousB
values
Below, we look at the difference between treatment and control at each pair of IVContinuousA
and IVContinuousB
.
ggplot(make_pred_dat(nA=100, nB=100) %>%
group_by(IVContinuousA, IVContinuousB) %>%
arrange(IVCategorical) %>%
summarise(DV = diff(DV)),
aes(x=IVContinuousA, y=IVContinuousB)) +
geom_tile(aes(fill=DV)) +
scale_fill_gradient2(low="red", mid="white", high="blue") +
labs(fill=expression(Delta*DV~(Treatment - Control)))
If you really want to avoid 3-d plotting, you could indeed turn one of the continuous variables into a categorical one for visualization purposes.
For the purpose of the answer, I used the Duncan
data set from the package car
, as it is of the same form as the one you described.
library(car)
# the data
data("Duncan")
# the fitted model; education and income are continuous, type is categorical
lm0 <- lm(prestige ~ education * income * type, data = Duncan)
# turning education into high and low values (you can extend this to more
# levels)
edu_high <- mean(Duncan$education) + sd(Duncan$education)
edu_low <- mean(Duncan$education) - sd(Duncan$education)
# the values below should be used for predictions, each combination of the
# categories must be represented:
prediction_mat <- data.frame(income = Duncan$income,
education = rep(c(edu_high, edu_low),each =
nrow(Duncan)),
type = rep(levels(Duncan$type), each =
nrow(Duncan)*2))
predicted <- predict(lm0, newdata = prediction_mat)
# rearranging the fitted values and the values used for predictions
df <- data.frame(predicted,
income = Duncan$income,
edu_group =rep(c("edu_high", "edu_low"),each = nrow(Duncan)),
type = rep(levels(Duncan$type), each = nrow(Duncan)*2))
# plotting the fitted regression lines
ggplot(df, aes(x = income, y = predicted, group = type, col = type)) +
geom_line() +
facet_grid(. ~ edu_group)